The Eternal Corpse Collector

On the Spirit-Test Stele, only half a square lit up for him. Before it could shine any brighter, it went out. The whole crowd burst into laughter. A low-grade mixed spiritual root. He’d be lucky to reach the Aperture Condensation stage in his lifetime. No one knew that the light had stopped halfway not because his spiritual root was weak, but because this world itself refused to acknowledge him. When he was five, all seven households on the Withered Bone Plain were wiped out in a single night. Of the 327 villagers, only he survived, while the rest were left as empty shells. The undertaker found him in the pile of corpses and raised him at the funeral home. He buried bodies, kept the accounts, and counted bone fragments. He did it all for ten years. A bamboo slip was pressed against his left ribs: a blank page torn from the Heavenly Register. Write down one name, and he aged by a year. The more names he wrote, the more people he forgot. Yet everything he did was meant to help him remember. Heaven and Earth had a register. Those entered in it received protection, but were also subject to reckoning. At the end of each era, it turned the page and collected everyone who had exceeded their limits, grinding them up to make the soil for the next era. In nine eternities, there had never been an exception. Shen Que was not in the register. There was only one thing he would do in this life: write back, stroke by stroke, the names that had been taken away.